On April 12, Olga Logunova and Pavel Lebedev will present their research “Digital celebrities and platform curation in the current Russian context“. Recently, Russian celebrities have lost access to popular global social media platforms. Additionally, some platforms have switched off all monetisation instruments for Russian content-makers. From today we can’t state the result of this transformation, as it is not finished yet. However we will discuss, how these changes affect celebrities and opinion leaders.

Online talk will be organized in Zoom April, 12 from 12:00 to 13:30 (Helsinki time). If you want to participate and get emails about the next online talks, please leave your contact information here until April, 11 noon: registration form. If you registered for Online talks or RMLN email list before, no need to register again, we’ll send you the information.

Research summary: The specific direction of this research is platform affordances and their influence on celebrities’ self-presentation and engagement patterns. The analysis covers more than 22K publicly available posts and comments from 15 Russian-speaking celebrities on three platforms (Instagram, TikTok and VK) (45 accounts totally). A quantitative analysis helped discover two basices for distinguishing digital celebrities’ practices: 1) platforms switching and 2) communication patterns on social media. The research provides conceptual and empirical grounds for studying engagement practice as one of the affordances in celebrities’ communication and outlines further directions to explore these connections.

Speakers’ bio: Dr Olga Logunova is an experienced academic researcher in sociology and media studies with a focus on digital culture, social media communication, digital literacy and celebrity studies. She evolves in academic and industrial research directions combining teaching, research projects, and participation in scientific associations and conferences. Her recent works have been published in, for example, The Russian Journal of Communication, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.

Pavel Lebedev is product lead in social media analytics field, grown from consumer research with hands-on experience. I develop AI and analytical IT products in the field of open-sourced data from social media. Big experience in marketing and CX research from defining goals till the research results implementation. His main area of expertise is innovative analytical methodologies – social media listening, research communities, usability testing etc.

Moderator: Dr Olga Dovbysh (Helsinki University)

Online talk on Russian Media is a collaborative initiative between Russian Media Lab Network, University of Helsinki, and Tampere Research Center for Russian and Chinese Media.

Photo by Matt Moloney on Unsplash

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *